ECU Economics Experimental Mobile Lab
Notes from 2005-10-06 experiment
Steps taken:
1. Notify Kim that the lab is going to be used. She has the forms for distribution of notebooks.
2. Sometime before the class, pick up keys and forms from Kim.
3. Navigate Mobile Lab from seminar room to your classroom and be careful about the electric cables which are on the side - it seems like they are always going to be hit if you are not careful on the corners. Also, it is easier to move the lab when the front wheels are the wheels that change direction, and remember to turn off breaks!
4. Do an experiment in class.
5. After the experiment put in notebooks inside the Mobile Lab storage and make sure you connect all power cables to notebooks.
6. When moving Mobile Lab storage to the seminar room, make sure you connect the electric cable to the outlet again. This way the notebooks will be recharged overnight.
Useful notes and observations:
- it is very useful to play an experiment on your own computer few days before the class. It is possible by just opening multiple windows and then logging in as students with different names! This way it is possible to create any type of results if needed.
- it would be useful to clearly mention (before the experiments begin) that any personal use of PC is not allowed with the mobile lab PC. In our experiment some undergraduates seemed to take advantage of it. Also, it is probably a good idea to ask students to close notebooks when you want lecture or explain results, just to not let them have the opportunity to play with the machine (when the notebooks are closed they are automatically put into hibernation and to "wake" them up the student needs to press the power button).
- policy on the ID collection for a notebook should be mentioned in advance. In our experiment three students did not have any form of id with them.
- it needs at least two people to operate the lab: one person sets up the experiment and explains what to do and the second person does logistics and works as a support person in case some students get stuck during the experiment.
- the way the experiment worked for us was to first distribute notebooks and make sure students logged in .Once we knew everyone is connected to the Internet we walked around the class, put down names with numbers for computers, and collected ids.
- five out of 21 notebooks did not want to login to INTRA initially. Some of them let us login later after restarting the machine, but some still do not seem to be working well - we have to check it with ITCS. Our solution was to give to students new notebooks which let them login and because we had just 16 students it still worked (some of them had to try three notebooks).
- to explain the experiment it is very useful to project one of the student's notebook outputs on the projector screen so that everyone follows. Once students are ready to play we gave the notebook back to the particular student.
- it takes about 20-30 min to get started with the set up and have the experiment ready to go. Then it goes pretty quickly but students sometimes must be reminded to make steps and not wait for any further instructions (the administrator page has the ability to check who did not make a move if students put their real names). Overall, the whole experiment can probably be done in about one hour, including setup, instructions, play, and final analysis.
- numbers start to peel off from the notebooks - we will have to ask Kim to put transparent tape over those numbers or take care for it another way. For now just take of a note of that.
- when the computer hibernates just ask students to press a power button and login again - they will be back to the stage where they left.
- even though students liked the experience and the extra credit was a good motivator, the game seemed pretty
abstract to them. It is probably useful to connect it to a real life example and give some actual meaning to the numbers used in the experiment.
